2023
Noa Bronstein Leo Cocar Arpad Kovacs Elliott Ramsey Mark Sealy Emmy Lee Wall
Capture 2023 4 305 Cambie St Vancouver, BC V6B 2N4 capturephotofest.com [email protected] #CapturePhotoFest2023 Capture Team Executive Director Emmy Lee Wall Assistant Curator Chelsea Yuill Festival Administrator Qian Cheng TD Assistant Curator of Engagement Sarah Danruo Wang Financial Administrator Jake Kimble Catalogue Coordinator Chelsea Yuill Graphic Designer Nadine Halston Copy Editor and Proofreader Kate Woolf Printing and Assembly Mitchell Press Front Cover: Steven Beckly Phantom Eye, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery All content © 2023 the artists, authors, and Capture Photography Festival Society. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. All images are reproduced courtesy of the artist unless otherwise specified. Capture is not responsible for the specific content or subject matter of any work displayed or advertised. Some images may be offensive, upsetting, or disturbing to some members of the public. For the most up-to-date programming information, please visit capturephotofest.com Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Capture Photography Festival / Noa Bronstein, Leo Cocar, Arpad Kovacs, Elliott Ramsey, Mark Sealy, Emmy Lee Wall. Names: Capture Photography Festival (2023), author, publisher. Description: Includes index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20230173969 | ISBN 9781777354725 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—British Columbia—Vancouver— Exhibitions. | LCSH: Public art—British Columbia—Vancouver— Exhibitions. | LCSH: Photography, Artistic—Exhibitions. | LCGFT: Exhibition catalogs. Classification: LCC TR655 .C3575 2023 | DDC 770.74711/33— dc23 Capture Photography Festival is produced by the Capture Photography Festival Society, a registered not-for-profit. Please share your Festival experience with us on Instagram, Facebook, and Vimeo at @capturephotofest Board of Directors Douglas Coupland, Co-Chair Bruce Munro Wright, Co-Chair Kate Galicz Mike Harris Tanner Kidd Alison Meredith Jordan Reber Tobi Reyes Mahdi Shams Evann Siebens Adrienne Wood Kim Spencer-Nairn, Founder and Chair Emerita Advisory Board Grant Arnold Claudia Beck Sophie Hackett Helga Pakasaar Donors $500+ Audain Foundation Claudia Beck Brigitte and Henning Freybe Jane Irwin and Ross Hill John and Helen O’Brian Michael and Inna O’Brian Kate and Jesse Galicz Mike and Sandra Harris Alison Meredith Mahdi Shams Paula Thomson and Tobi Reyes Adrienne Wood and Sam Li Shauna Woolley Founding Donors Anonymous Anonymous John and Nina Cassils Stephen Carruthers Chan Family Foundation Mike and Sandra Harris Brian and Andrea Hill Jane Irwin and Ross Hill Hy’s of Canada Ltd. Jason and AJ McLean Michael O’Brian Family Foundation Radcliffe Foundation Ron Regan Eric Savics and Kim Spencer-Nairn April 1–30, 2023
5 Supporters Presented by Supporting Sponsors Leonard Schein Ian and Nancy Telfer Samantha J. Walker (in memory of) Bruce Munro Wright Thank you Claudia Beck Dr. Isolde Brielmaier Dr. Curtis Collins Miguel Cuenca Danielle Currie Shaun Dacey Dan Donais Daniel Faria John Goldsmith Sky Goodden Sidney Gordon Peter-Frank Heuseveldt Sophie Hackett Jeff Hamada Richard Hill Quyen Hoang Jane Irwin Alysha Jacobs Anna Kasko Gosia Kamela Bahar Kamali Chris Keatley Stuart Keeler Darcy Killeen Lindsay Kilpatrick Arpad Kovacs Jas Lally Lauren Lavery Nya Lewis Michael Love Sophie Mackay Kyla Mallett Robert Marks Ian McGuffie AJ McLean Dr. Kenneth Montague Rebecca Morse Inna O’Brian Birthe Piontek Anoop Pittalwala Ananna Rafa Elliott Ramsey Stephanie Rebick Julia Rojas Cory Root Sheila Sampath Amit Sanghera Chantal Shah Reid Shier Thomas Tran Biliana Velkova Gaëtane Verna Sam Wall Michael Wesik Jenny Wilson Gloria Wong Contributing Sponsors In-Kind Sponsors We gratefully acknowledge the support of Partners
Capture 2023 6 Viviane Sassen Untitled 017, from the Roxane II series, 2017 Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson Part of the Arbutus Greenway Pattison Billboard Public Art Project
7
Capture 2023 8 Welcome to Capture I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. – Gordon Parks With the statement above, artist, writer, composer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks was prescient in recognizing photography as a tool of resistance and a mechanism for change. He used his work to advance what he described as “the common search for a better life and a better world.” It is this powerful ability to advocate for difference and posit alternative futures that Capture Photography Festival celebrates. Welcome to the 2023 Festival! We are thrilled to share this year’s catalogue, which includes commissioned editorial content by Noa Bronstein, Leo Cocar, and Mark Sealy. Arpad Kovacs writes cogently on Steven Beckly’s BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation public art commission, which speaks to the urgency of environmental awareness. As always, we are pleased to use our catalogue as a platform to give voice directly to artists, including Rebecca Bair, Steven Beckly, and Svava Tergesen, who have all participated in interviews. Public art is at the core of our programming, and in addition to the artists presented along the Canada Line, we are very excited to be exhibiting the work of Viviane Sassen, and Lucas Blalock as part of the Pattison Outdoor Billboard Project this year. 2023 marks our tenth anniversary, and we have taken this opportunity to ask ten Vancouver-based artists to create new works for Capture’s Featured Exhibition, Here and Now, that explore the idea of place as a social construct – its varied histories and competing narratives. We are also including texts celebrating As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, on view at The Polygon Gallery, and The Children Have to Hear Another Story: Alanis Obomsawin, presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery, both Featured Exhibitions for 2023. Capture is a true collaboration between artists, curators, audiences, organizations, donors, and sponsors, and I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone who engages with and supports the Festival. I especially want to acknowledge TD Bank, Capture’s Presenting Sponsor – we simply could not execute the Festival without their support. We are tremendously grateful to TD Bank for being true partners with us in amplifying diverse voices. At the end of 2022, Kim Spencer-Nairn, Capture’s founder, stepped down as Board Chair after more than a decade of leadership. I am thrilled to have Douglas Coupland and Bruce Munro Wright as our new Co-Chairs, and I want to extend my deepest appreciation to our dedicated Board for their steadfast guidance. I am also consistently amazed by what, we at Capture, are able to accomplish with such a small and agile staff – it is their positivity and commitment that makes the Festival possible. Thank you so much for bringing your amazing energy to work every day – your contributions are critical to Capture’s success! Finally, I want to thank the art community – every artist, writer, cultural worker, and curator who is participating in Capture this year – for the perspectives you offer. We do this work to provide a platform for new voices, to incite dialogue, to inspire, and to offer the opportunity to see things a little differently, if only for a moment. We are grateful to you for your innovation and vision. Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director
9 TEXTS PUBLIC ART FEATURED EXHIBITIONS EDUCATIONAL PARTNERSHIP SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Three Sketches on Photographic Excess Picturing Place The Insomnia of the Image BC Hydro Dal Grauer Public Art Project Anvil Centre Public Art Project Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project Canada Line Public Art Project Here and Now Pendulum Gallery Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery Audain Art Museum As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic The Polygon Gallery The Children Have to Hear Another Story: Alanis Obomsawin Vancouver Art Gallery Looking After: Photography as an Act of Care Capture x ECUAD Selected Exhibitions Leo Cocar Noa Bronstein Mark Sealy Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill Emmy Lee Wall Elliott Ramsey Richard Hill and Hila Peleg 10–13 14–17 18–21 26–39 40–43 44–47 48–49 50–57 60–71 72–75 76–81 82–85 112–113 86–111
Capture 2023 10 Jake Kimble Grow Up #1, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project
11 TEXTS Three Sketches on Photographic Excess Picturing Place The Insomnia of the Image Leo Cocar Noa Bronstein Mark Sealy 10–13 14–17 18–21
Capture 2023 12 Nabil Azab Untitled, 2022 archival inkjet print 104.14 x 106.68 cm Courtesy of the Artist
13 TEXTS Three Sketches on Photographic Excess Leo Cocar, Capture Writing Prize Recipient My phone’s camera roll is filled with trash. An indulgent spread of under-thought, hot, steaming garbage. Nightscapes that are breathtaking when experienced in the flesh but are (aesthetically) undone by the technical limitations of my phone’s camera. Multiple series of a dozen or so busted selfies that were necessary in order to get “the one.” Images, saved from auction sites and web stores, of objects of desire that I will never buy, but keep stored on my phone’s hard drive regardless. Thousands of accumulated images that seem unworthy of existing, a series of mementos that barely register as meaningful to me. The ease of the camera roll – its electronic ethereality – almost invites accumulation. Conversations with friends and others suggest that this compulsive act of imaging nearly everything and anything is common. My interest in the excess of the camera roll is prompted by two elements – an art historical interest in the redeployment of quotidian materials and their value in techno-capitalism. Although collage, assemblage, and the (re)deployment of found objects are techniques that have become embedded in art practices since the modern period, histories of filmic and photographic montage offer a fertile ground zero from which to begin a discussion of the camera roll. Here, I offer three loose sketches of the convergence between art production and the diaphanous space of our phones’ pictorial archive, contextualized through the work of Nabil Azab, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, and Giovanni Fredi.
Capture 2023 14 Illegible Subjects: Nabil Azab It feels as if the selling point for every new generation of iPhone is centered first and foremost on the camera. Boasting advances in zoom functions and resolution, smartphones are now sold under the guise of optical clarity. For me, what renders Azab’s practice compelling is the interest in subjectivity and non-transparency: his images are unintelligible but bear the unmistakable mark of the maker’s hand. What does it mean to produce illegible images? Are they a celebration of the archive’s excess, in that these photographic subjects are rendered in ways not intended by technology’s promise of crystalline precision? Looking at Azab’s work, I am reminded of Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, in which he argues that relationships between subjects are framed not by a need to understand each other but by a recognition of the fundamental impossibility of mutual understanding. The unrecognizable and non-citational nature of Azab’s work refuses the myth of the camera’s scientific objectivity while underscoring the potentially sublime (via formal elements that exaggerate the aesthetic qualities of the actual subject) or ecstatic nature (via technical errors rendered through the excitement of taking the photograph) of what may be considered to be technological faults. His images, which may be read as opaque, have a bodily element to them in the sense that we begin to wonder, when looking, what it was about the experience of taking the picture that made it compelling enough to develop further. His recent corpus of work, which includes projections of images from his family archive that are photographed via long exposure, enters the territory of light painting, drawing a throughline between the physicality of experience and its ethereality when rendered in photographic form. Categorical Osmosis: Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes A picture of the artist’s brother is swarmed by small stickers and flanked by images of roses (the origin of these may be wholly the artist, or they may be sourced from elsewhere). The two ideas at play in Kriangwiwat Holmes’s oeuvre (and particularly in this image) are the role of commercial imagery in the construction of the self and the illegibility of photographic origins. I use “commercial” loosely, here – not only referring to images used for marketing, but the industry of stock images, and also the way in which photographs are constantly circulated on the web at large, contributing to data extraction and site traffic. In short, any image that wasn’t taken by you. In an era marked by the endless cycle of image reposting – which obfuscates the hand and name of the original maker – Kriangwiwat Holmes plays with this tension by employing imagery so benign, it could swing either way. She doubles down on this effect by leaning into modes of commercial photography, which are, by default, largely anonymous. Her interest in commercial photography harkens back to one of the major components of my camera roll as mentioned earlier: product shots. Her juxtaposition of familial images and stock photography gestures toward the ideas posited by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle; namely, the way in which media presents commodities (or objects of desire) as things that stand for ideas of things beyond the commodity’s composition of raw material and labour.1 If the camera roll can be said to be a sort of archive – a chimera of personal photos and saved imagery – Kriangwiwat Holmes draws attention to the way in which these two seemingly disparate elements merge together. Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Aaron, 2019 digital collage 38.73 x 22.86 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17
15 TEXTS Cloud Rendered Flesh: Giovanni Fredi In Giovanni Fredi’s first solo exhibition, held at SMDOT/Contemporary Art in Udine, Italy, a series of gestural marks of varying width and colour adorn the bare walls alongside a series of vinyl squares. What appears at first glance to be a series of abstract expressionist throwbacks (which they are, on some conceptual level) are in fact the ghostly traces of his fingertips as they edited and flicked through his phone’s image library. Executed on an app designed by the artist, his gestural images act as an index of his own physical interactions with his photographic archive – a trace of the image as experienced by the body. When mainstream discourse creates an artificial divide between the technological and the physical, Fredi’s practice reminds us that the act of interfacing with the screen is fundamentally embodied, rewiring our nervous system and baking itself into our musculature, our ligaments, and our flesh. Fredi’s practice brings me back to a jarring encounter with my infant cousin, who instinctively understood how to queue up videos on YouTube before she could speak – a pre-linguistic understanding of user interfaces and the visual language that constructs them. In Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, he argues that technology has no essential essence; rather, it is an instrument, or means towards an end.2 In a sense, technology (a category I would argue extends toward the camera roll and the art object) entails an ordering of the world’s raw materials, whose ultimate form reveals an essence about said technology. It is not that the camera roll is a neutral space for memory storage; it ultimately plays to a capitalist ethos of extraction, for which our memories of the world are but another node of value production. The camera roll isn’t merely a tool that sits idly by, waiting for use; it has its own ideological bent, and it inflects itself upon us. What Azab, Kriangwiwat Holmes, and Fredi do in their practices is lay bare the relationship of the camera to the cloud and digital imaging for all to see. Working off of Heidegger, I read these works as revelatory, a potential speed bump in the process of photographic value extraction executed through lens-based formal language that refuses the branded language of technological process. An eschewment of crystalline clarity and the weightless ether of the virtual archive for the opaque, the messy, and the excessive. 1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (Oakland: AKPress, 2005), 17. 2. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 4. Giovanni Fredi Japan (Lines) series, 2020/22 Lambda print face mounted on acrylic, laminated aluminum backing, 100 x 70 cm ea. triptych Courtesy of the Artist and SMDOT/ Contemporary Art
Capture 2023 16 Hannah Collins I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with the night air above my head (video still), 2018 HD video with sound 20:34 min. Courtesy of the Artist
17 TEXTS Picturing Place Noa Bronstein Architecture and photography have an entangled history made evident by the earliest of photographic images turning their attention to buildings and façades. Architecture made for an obliging sitter, its stillness perfectly suited to the particularities of the first cameras. Yet it was not merely its co-operativeness that made the built environment such appealing fodder for these early images. The documentation of architecture translated modernist aspirations and imperialist ambitions – amongst other things – into consumable records. Then, as now, we experienced architecture photographically; we consumed architecture visually. We most often enter buildings through their representational forms rather than their front doors. Put another way, we recognize and know iconic, classical, or the newest of spaces from images, not necessarily from our bodies coming into direct contact with a structure or place. This proved useful from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century in introducing the ideologies and desires embedded in certain architectures to those who might not have direct access to these sites of significance. Whether Édouard Baldus’s photographic surveys of France’s architectural patrimony, Philip Henry Delamotte’s documentation of the reconstruction of the Crystal Palace, Charles Clifford’s views of the royal palaces in Spain and commissions for Queen Victoria and Queen Isabella II, or Berenice Abbott’s depictions of iconic edifices of New York, architecture as subject has deeply and recurrently informed history’s photographic catalogue. While the picturing of architecture has certainly not abated, its tenor remains ever-shifting as contemporary artists work to address the social structuring embedded in physical structures. One approach has been to move away from the monumental towards the mundane, from sites of power to the power of site on an individual or community level. Another is the enduring interest in liminal space, signaling a desire to see beyond image and form into sites of new possibility.
Capture 2023 18 Hannah Collins’s recent still and moving images constituting her exhibition I Will Make Up a Song (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019) offer examples of these photographic impulses. The work focuses in on two major sites designed by Egyptian modernist architect Hassan Fathy: New Gourna and New Baris (both in Egypt). Fathy was interested in addressing concerns related to housing, poverty, and environmentally responsible design, and Collins’s images suggestively trace his “utopian experiments in sustainable architecture and rural community building.”1 In the video I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with the night air above my head (2018), we move deliberately through New Gourna, which Fathy was commissioned to build in 1945 for the relocation of the 7,000 residents of the village of Old Gourna. Constructed using local materials and a process analogous to permaculture, Fathy had hoped to establish a materially and aesthetically inspired settlement as compared to the original Gourna, but the project ultimately fell short of his aspirations.2 Collins’s protracted and patient images show both emptied and occupied spaces, subtly pointing to how many residents never fully embraced the development of New Gourna, opting to move elsewhere. The remaining residents appear making use of interstitial spaces, occupying the architecture on their own terms. Overall, these images do not propose a definitive account of triumph nor failure, offering instead ingress to consider “the materials and structures that constitute and support our lives. . . [and] questions about how humans can make a home for themselves and a livable world for one another.”3 Taking a relatedly poetic and nuanced approach to contending with built forms is Taqralik Partridge’s artwork akunniq. Her images of structures and infrastructure taken in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and Dorval, Québec present portraits of place through the reveal of subtle details, including the roof of a green-painted structure set to a snowy expanse, or a lone figure walking through a brightly lit underpass at night. Partridge terms these “throwaway spaces,” clarifying that, for many, they fall within a consumptive worldview of natural and constructed space. She states, “Their only function is to connect more important spaces; otherwise, they’re forgotten about. [My] contention is that Inuit move through and inhabit these landscapes with the same awareness of our connections to land as we do in so-called pristine landscapes.”4 Shown as lightboxes, these “throwaway spaces” are elevated through Partridge’s camera (sometimes her cellphone) and the tending glow of their framing, reversing the normative value proposition of what sorts of spaces may be thought worthy of documentation and, therefore, of consideration and care. akunniq challenges notions of disposability and what might otherwise be taken to be disregarded or imperceptible places by making visible Inuit self-determined space. What unites contemporary efforts such as those of Collins, and Partridge is a means of relating counter- or underrepresented histories and realities with propositions for how to visualize alternate social orders. In our current moment, then, many images resist the dominant narratives attached to the built environment – to streetscapes and cityscapes, to neighbourhoods and dwellings, to alleyways and rooftops – preferring to offer incitements into divergent modes of living or imagining the world otherwise. Elsewhere, photographs reveal architecture that already inhabits its own space of refusal, or even resistance. These compelling encounters traverse public and private spaces, geographies, and assorted scales to bring us into close contact with the social production of space in all its multitudes and reverberations. Shared between these and countless other examples is a deep concern for how we inhabit the world, both through and beyond images. Within such expansive modalities
19 TEXTS and imaginings, images serve to reframe the spatial and social experience of architecture. Rather than flatten the built form, contemporary lens-based artists construct dimensionality – demonstrating that the experience of an image can change our understanding of a space, and asking that we recognize the material conditions shaping our lives and our capacities to shape these in turn. 1. “Hannah Collins: I Will Make Up a Song,” SFMOMA (website), accessed October 10, 2022, https://www. sfmoma.org/exhibition/hannahcollins-i-will-make-up-a-song. 2. Monica Westin, “Hannah Collins’s ‘I Will Make Up a Song,’” Art Agenda Reviews, published November 14, 2019, https://www.art-agenda.com/ criticism/300668/hannah-collins-s-iwill-make-up-a-song. 3. Ibid. 4. Taqralik Partridge, quoted in exhibition didactic for ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2022.
Capture 2023 20 Fazal Sheikh Fatuma Abdi Hussein and her son Abdullai Somali refugee camp, Mandera, Kenya from the A Camel for the Son series, 1992 gelatin silver print 40.64 x 50.8 cm Courtesy of the Artist ©
21 TEXTS The Insomnia of the Image Mark Sealy In early October 2022, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) transmitted a prime-time news special report on the effect of decades of conflict and climate change on Somalia. The focus was a small district hospital located at the border town of Dollow. The report informed us that people desperately needed help, and many small, malnourished children were fighting for life. Close your eyes. This image is etched on your mind. How and why? Because it gets disseminated across the Global North as a restless and agitating visual trope that will not allow those whom Frantz Fanon called “the Wretched of the Earth” a time, a history, or a place to rest. For those who look with more than eyes, there lies in wait the insomnia of the image. Western epistemes and news media cynically reproduce broken black bodies with a relentless extracting force. Throughout the broadcast, people arrived at Dollow exhausted, starving, and traumatized. Decades of wars, drought, and famine have ripped the heart out of the Somalian nation. When aligned so perfectly, these soul-destroying and colonizing conditions are allconsuming. In this state, everything in life, including hope, gets turned to dust. Having made the arduous journey to Dollow, walking nine days or more across the desert, now exhausted and bewildered, many arrive to be greeted by yet another aggressive presence: the colonizing lens. It surveys the people working to erect their makeshift forms of shelter. These dome-like structures patched together from cloth, plastic, and wood offer precarious protection and function as reminders of how vulnerable life across the Somali Peninsula is. Here in these visual moments, all colonial history is denied. The media machine has consumed the past and presents the present as an unrelated reality. The BBC reporter introduces the audience to Abdiwali Abdi, a twoyear-old boy suffering from severe malnutrition. He is in an awful condition.
Capture 2023 22 The report focuses on Abdiwali, lying on a hospital bed, weakened, and hanging on to the edge of life. His horizonless stare informs us that he is trapped in a dark colonial abyss he is powerless to resist; he is too young, too weak. As the camera pans out from the scene, we are shown a small team of doctors and nurses working to save Abdiwali. His core temperature has dropped rapidly, and this development is now a significant concern for doctors. A small, foil-like, silver thermal blanket is all the medical team has to work with, and they carefully wrap it around the child in the hope that this will save his life. It fails. The death of Abdiwali was prescribed long before his birth by the imperial geopolitics at work across the region. The colonizing conditions that caused Abdiwali’s death, of course, arrived long before his birth, but they linger, and they kill. In the foreground, Abdiwali’s mother, Hawa, is now the focus. She is seated on a nearby bed, helpless, distressed, slumped in tears. Her child has just died of what the senior doctor on the ward would later describe as “something that can be prevented and corrected very easily.” As the camera pans out further, we can see Abdiwali’s father, Karad Adan, pacing up and down, distraught; we are informed that he was on the phone with relatives arranging the funeral for later that day. Within a few hours, Abdiwali Abdi was buried in the hard-baked, dusty grounds on the outskirts of Dollow. Outside of the Western news media’s tragic, observational, “empathic” frames of reference, we can, if we pause to reflect, draw direct timelines of death and devastation back through the centuries of violent imperial encounters that lead us to the single moment of Abdiwali’s passing. Like many others, this innocent child was trapped in what Walter Mignolo describes as the “colonial matrix of power.”1 The colonial matrix of power makes possible all the conditions that create the geopolitical death camps situated throughout the Global South. These places have a unique binding quality. They turn hope into a distant memory. But the photographer Aïda Muluneh refuses to let hope die. Based in Ethiopia, she produces images that interrogate the politics of comfort. In discussing her series from 2017 titled Memory of Hope, she states, “We are the witnesses who stand at the side of the road, shackled by comfort and conformity. We are the consumers of the pain of others, and we are the supporters of a distorted future.”2 Muluneh’s work is a reminder that the deployment of “tactical empathy” is a seductive, brain-numbing presence across our superficial desire to care.3 Considering what lies beyond the frames of news journalism, the abyss of our dark, imperial, colonizing world opens an image space occupied by armies of ghosts that haunt our time. If we investigate the dark image-time of history, all that remains is the dense matter of colonial horror. This core visual matter is an essentializing substance formed through colonizing legacies and foreign presences that are genocidal in nature and extractive in purpose. These legacies stretch back to a time before the massacre at Omdurman/Sudan in 1898, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and the Cold War policies that have been played out across the Somali Peninsula from 1945 onward. In what I refer to as “racial time,” these acts place strategic imperial military positionalities as forever being of higher value than human lives. The outcome of these imperial forms of violence has led to what seems like a forever-unsustainable human existence. In watching the BBC’s broadcast, a photographic space-time wormhole opens, linking drought/famine/conflict/death/Africa into a representational field of knowledge that constructs conflict and climate crisis across the Global South as an acceptable, inevitable, and distant concern for those who manage the universal order or truth code of things. Let me emphasize the role of imperial temporality in the enterprise of imperial destruction. The latter produces asymmetrical conditions:
23 TEXTS 1. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 111. 2. Aïda Muluneh, “The Memory of Hope,” Aïda Muluneh artist website, accessed January 9, 2022, https:// www.aidamuluneh.com/memory-ofhope. 3. Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev, “The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 1 (January 2015), 14. 4. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso Books, 2019), 77. poor, assetless, and dependent peoples on the one hand, monopoly over resources, capacities for accumulation, and modes of circulation on the other. Under imperial temporality, the violent processes of impoverishment and dispossessing people (mainly, but not only non-white people) are obscured by the ideology that poverty is a state, an attribute of such people, who require, at best, rescue.4 The rescue equation of imperial temporality or racial time signals an underlying imperial presence as a paradox – a myth – that states we improve and preserve. Distorted modes of empathy politically dislocate and cloak the oppressive colonizing violence that has historically worked across the Somali Peninsula and throughout the Global South as a phenomenon organic to a region. Admas Habteslasie’s series Limbo (2000–07) also draws on the fragility and divergent temporalities of human rights and conflict across the Somali Peninsula. The calm, reflective colour in his images collectively relays an atmosphere of deep malaise, as the impact of decades of war and famine that Eritreans have endured has, over time, sucked the life out of a people and their capacity to imagine a future. The thirty-year War of Independence with Ethiopia destroyed any hope for generations of Eritreans and has left a hardfought-for country smashed through both conflict and environmental disaster. Habteslasie’s photographs move the viewer to a space of contemplation and an understanding that the Global South cannot be left as a place where memory and history are suspended or locked out of our time. This representational field forms part of a well-established visual episteme that works to fix what gets framed as part of the natural world order. To communicate the geopolitical complexities across the Somali Peninsula, imperial news channels, working through empathy, revert to offering up the broken African subject and their environment for further consumption. The effect of the dark colonial time is not messaged. Within the context of this form of news media, conflict, and climate crisis stand as isolated moments disconnected from colonizing time. The colonizing camera is most dangerous when it works through the lens of empathy. When the colonizing world pays attention through its news-gathering institutions to the disastrous conditions it has created over different temporal regimes of control, it negates, ignores, and denies its own role in the devastation of colonized lives in our present. Best, then, we reset time to 1992, as this can be our now, when photographer Fazal Sheikh visited Nairobi, the home of his Father’s family. At the time, Kenya was dealing with a massive humanitarian crisis as thousands of Somalian refugees fleeing the deadly combination of war and famine were entering the country. Sheikh’s project titled A Camel for the Son (1992–2000) is a complex journey through the horror of political and cultural identity formations. His work engages deeply with the condition of those living with death as a companion. He worked in dialogue for eight years with those who sought sanctuary within refugee camps. The radical nature of what Sheikh produced during his involvement with Somalian refugees comes from his breaking down of the objectifying distance and simplistic narratives that often accompany the representation of the “African” as a refugee. This work expands not only in time but through the question of rights, as the work evolved from within to focus primarily on the critical question of the rights of women and young girls, who are exposed and vulnerable to sexual assault while living in the camps. Sheikh’s works from the refugee camps in Kenya are time travellers. Thirty years ago, this body of photographs called out for change, demanding that the humanitarian disasters at work across the Somali Peninsula be addressed and that we rethink through the insomnia of the image so that we, as human subjects, can relocate our imaginations to a place of rest.
Capture 2023 24 Rebecca Bair Curl Mapped, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Anvil Centre Public Art Project
25 PUBLIC ART
Capture 2023 26 Meganelizabeth Diamond me too, let’s canoe, 2017 Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Canada Line Public Art Project
27 PUBLIC ART BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project Phantom Eye: An Interview with Steven Beckly Curl Mapped: An Interview with Rebecca Bair Cosmic Vision: Intimacy and the Unknown in Steven Beckly’s Commission for the Dal Grauer Substation Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Anvil Centre Public Art Project Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project Canada Line Public Art Project Emmy Lee Wall Emmy Lee Wall Arpad Kovacs 26–39 35–36 41–43 37–39 44–47 40–43 48–49 50–57
Capture 2023 28 BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project Jessica Eaton DG Weave, 2015 Jessica Eaton DG Weave, 2015 Courtesy of the Artist Site photo: Nelson Mouëllic Installation mock-up: Robert Marks Presented in partnership with Burrard Arts Foundation Capture Photography Festival annually commissions artists to create new site-specific works to be installed on the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation’s façade. Drawing on the building itself, these projects temporarily emphasize the substation in the streetscape and reassert it as an architectural icon. In celebration of Capture’s tenth anniversary, we are highlighting past renditions of this monumental public art project. April 2015 – March 2016 944 Burrard St, Vancouver Curated by Capture Photography Festival
29 PUBLIC ART Stephen Waddell The Collector and the Showroom, 2016 Stephen Waddell The Collector and the Showroom, 2016 Courtesy of the Artist and Monte Clark, Vancouver Site photo and installation mock-up: Nelson Mouëllic Curated by Kate Bellringer, Burrard Arts Foundation, and Meredith Preuss, Capture Photography Festival April 2016 – March 2017
Capture 2023 30 Alex Morrison Brand New Era Social Club, 2017 Alex Morrison Brand New Era Social Club, 2017 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Nelson Mouëllic April 2017 – March 2018 Curated by Capture Photography Festival
31 PUBLIC ART Nadia Belerique In the Belly of the Cat, 2018 Nadia Belerique In the Belly of the Cat, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Site photo: Nelson Mouëllic Installation mock-up: Alina Ilyasova Curated by Meredith Preuss, Capture Photography Festival April 2018 – March 2019
Capture 2023 32 Krista Belle Stewart Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 Krista Belle Stewart Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Roaming-the-Planet Curated by Kate Henderson, Capture Photography Festival April 2019 – March 2020
33 PUBLIC ART Kapwani Kiwanga Counter-Illumination, 2020 Kapwani Kiwanga Counter-Illumination, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Rachel Topham Photography Curated by Kate Henderson, Capture Photography Festival April 2020 – March 2021
Capture 2023 34 Jordan Bennett al’taqiaq: it spirals, 2021 Jordan Bennett al’taqiaq: it spirals, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Jocelyne Junker Curated by Kate Henderson April 2021 – March 2022
35 PUBLIC ART Sara Cwynar Umi, 2022 Sara Cwynar Umi, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto Photo: Jocelyne Junker Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival April 2022 – March 2023
Capture 2023 36 BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project Steven Beckly Phantom Eye, 2023 Steven Beckly Phantom Eye, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery Site photo: Nelson Mouëllic Installation mock-up: Robert Marks Sponsored by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival April 2023 – March 2024 944 Burrard St, Vancouver
37 PUBLIC ART Phantom Eye: An Interview with Steven Beckly Emmy Lee Wall Steven Beckly’s work uses light, the human body, and material manipulation to explore what he calls the “continuum of intimacy” – whether with ourselves, others, or the world around us. Phantom Eye, Beckly’s site-specific installation for the façade of the Dal Grauer Substation, was inspired by news images documenting the so-called “eye of fire” that, according to petroleum company Pemex, resulted when lighting struck gas leaking from an underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico in 2021. Beckly was awestruck by this environmental disaster and the ensuing viral images that seemed to document the impossible: fire burning on water. In translating the idea of an “eye of fire” into an artwork, Beckly layered an image of an eye and a NASA image of Phantom Galaxy M74, merging the human with the cosmic and suggesting our inextricable relationship with the natural world that surrounds us. In depicting a human eye at this monumental scale, Beckly also invites a meditation on the possibility that art presents, when looking carefully and deeply, to experience an awakening. Emmy Lee Wall The considerations when creating a large-scale public work are many. Can you talk a little bit about the differences, for you, when creating a new work for a public site versus a work intended for a gallery exhibition? Steven Beckly When I’m creating a new work for a public site, I start with questions about the place and the people who reside there. Who is the audience of this artwork? Why does this work belong in this place and in this time? It was great to have had the chance to come to Vancouver for a site visit. Seeing and experiencing the site and surroundings in person; meeting with friends,
Capture 2023 38 peers, and people from the local community; asking questions and getting various perspectives – all of this gave me a sense of direction in developing this work. In the context of a gallery exhibition, the questions that come up are usually motivated by a conceptual framework or some personal interest. There are still considerations regarding the audience; it just so happens that when I’m working in the public realm, I’m especially mindful of them. ELW What was the inspiration for this image? We had a few iterations before we landed on this work – can you talk a little bit about this process? SB The starting point of this work stems from an image that popped up in my newsfeed in 2021. It showed a swirling inferno in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean – the result of a leak from an underwater gas pipe in the Gulf of Mexico. I remember being struck by a sense of disbelief when I saw the image for the first time. I couldn’t fully understand what I was looking at; the juxtaposition of fire and water, and how the event was framed by the mainstream media – these were some things I wanted to explore and question. Along the way, what I was reading and watching influenced a lot of my research and how I approached making the final image. I often think of art-making as similar to writing a poem: the poet usually writes several drafts before arriving at the finished piece. Every now and then, the first draft is the work, but most of the time that’s not the case. When I look at the iterations that came before this image, I can see a gradual progression from the literal to the metaphoric. The earlier versions were precise in their descriptive power, but they lacked the poetry, or punctum, in this final image. ELW For me, your experimental approach to process is super interesting because it offers resistance to the idea that a good photograph is sharply, clearly rendered. Everyone wants the latest iPhone for a camera with higher resolution, and you’re purposefully going the other way! Can you describe your actual process of making? Your final image is so layered and visually complex – would you be able to share how you achieved this effect? SB I created this work by layering two images: a close-up image of a human eye and a NASA image of Phantom Galaxy M74. I printed the eye on a sheet of transparency and placed it in front of my computer screen showing the galactic spirals of M74. What you’re looking at is the convergence of the two images in one photograph. The NASA image that gives this work its cosmic colour and texture is itself a composite image from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes working together in multiple wavelengths, offering us the most comprehensible view of M74 to date. I’m interested in what happens and what is possible when separate technologies – or forces – come together. ELW I’m curious about your use of the eye as a motif – it seems to be what drew your initial interest to the “eye of fire” that was the result of the gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the central focus of this work, Phantom Eye. Can you talk a bit about the symbolic significance of the eye for you, especially as a lens-based artist? SB One way to describe my initial experience of seeing the “eye of fire” would be awe. Within that strange mixture of terror and wonder, I also felt the stretching and opening of my own eyes to something impossible to forget. Phantom Eye refers to this environmental incident through the presence of fire and water in the image: I burned the iris with a candle flame, and the water droplets were the final additions. When I was developing this image, I started reading Death of the PostHuman by Claire Colebrook, a volume of essays on extinction.1 I think her highlighting of the limitations of human vision and the need for a cultural shift in perspective that can envision a world without the human species is relevant to what we’re talking about – the work of opening one’s own eyes and awakening. I still hold onto the belief that art and photography can facilitate this kind of work. Thankfully, we don’t have to do this alone; we can also do this in community. ELW These are anxious times. For you, what is the purpose of public art during this politically turbulent time of social divide? SB When I asked the community what people want from their public art experience, particularly at this moment in time, the common answer was beauty. I get the sense that many of us feel disconnected from beauty right now and deeply desire a reconnection to the resplendent. The difficult task for me was to find beauty within an environmental disaster and present it in a way that doesn’t recycle the fear and anxiety that is perpetuated by the mainstream news media. I hope this work does something radically different. Through the act of reframing, I hope it offers viewers a way of connecting the cosmos out there and the divine within them, and inspires questions regarding humanity’s relationship to the environment, energy, and power. 1. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, an imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2014).
39 PUBLIC ART Cosmic Vision: Intimacy and the Unknown in Steven Beckly’s Commission for the Dal Grauer Substation Arpad Kovacs Steven Beckly’s photographs often appear dreamlike and evocative of an otherworldly plane, a place that melds the physical with the psychedelic. In his installations, he regularly plays with, and occasionally chafes against, the expectation for photographic prints to be two-dimensional objects that faithfully describe the world as seen on the other end of the camera’s lens. Regularly depicting fragments of subjects, fleeting moments, and constructed scenes that a viewer is then positioned to reassemble, his compositions can easily elude a quick reading. These approaches to the medium call to mind the works of other artists whose practices aim to visualize a feeling or an abstract concept. In this way, Beckly’s practice alludes to the origins of conceptualism in the 1960s, but as approached by artists a generation later, like Félix GonzálesTorres, and Uta Barth. Beckly brings together individual elements that together suggest a larger idea found outside the bounds of the frame. Phantom Eye, the monumental work commissioned by Capture Photography Festival for the façade of the Dal Grauer Substation in downtown Vancouver, exemplifies Beckly’s interest in juxtaposing multiple points of reference. As a composite of two separate images – one created by the artist and the other sourced online – the work points to two opposing ideas. One is the human eye, the organ that allows us to perceive and understand our environment and which has also served poetic and psychological functions in literature and art. The second is an image of cosmic matter; it too is a composite of
Capture 2023 40 multiple images, here representing the largely unknown, recorded by mechanized lenses that can provide a glimpse into the previously unseen. These images, which evoke parallel meanings about ways of seeing, are layered one on top of the other. When installed, the large scale also magnifies a naturally small organ. The eye becomes nearly the size of a telescope’s mirror, amplifying what can be seen. The disintegrated pupil in the image, however, negates the eye’s core function and potentially subverts a clear comparison of the eye as functioning as a telescope that allows us to see the previously invisible. Increasing the scale does not make for a more powerful and perceptive organ. As Beckly was thinking about his source material and making this photograph, he repeatedly returned to the idea of moving back and forth between two states of mind: clear-eyed vision and knowledge gained through the lens of psychedelics – altered states of mind. This reminded me of the ever-unresolved distinction between the human eye and the machine eye – the camera. We often take for granted that they are one and the same but forget that they allow for very different types of vision. Phantom Eye was originally inspired by an aerial view of an ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2021. The disaster resulted from an underwater gas leak that sparked a blaze on the water’s surface. This image of a giant ball of fire surrounded by violently churning waters was more akin to a visual translation of the literary tradition of magic realism than the documentary tradition circulated in newspapers. Media coverage seized on the dramatic literary potential, and many outlets employed language like “eye of fire” to describe the unbelievable event and related images. This form of anthropomorphizing an ecological disaster is a way of straining to understand the seemingly impossible, something that can perhaps only happen in the depths of a fever dream. The combination of two diametrically opposing elemental Photo: Steven Beckly, Artist’s studio, October 19, 2022
41 PUBLIC ART 1. Mary Ann Caws, ed., Surrealism (London: Phaidon Press, 2004), 144. 2. Ibid., 70. 3. Katherine Ware, In Focus: Man Ray, ed. Weston Naef (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 56. 4. Bella Isaacs Thomas, “How the James Webb Space Telescope Captures Stunning Images of Space,” PBS NewsHour, acessed December 6, 2022, https://www.pbs.org /news hour/science/how-the-james -webb-space-telescope-captures-stunning-images-of -space. forces, water and fire, is evocative of the surreal while also serving as a perfect expression of a collective anxiety. The constant stream of warning signs with which we are inundated by nature and ecological activists does not compare to something so visceral. For Beckly, this was a moment of awakening: a moment that resonated and spurred a deep dive into thinking about how we see the world around us with limited capabilities. Beckly’s allusion to the eye is metaphoric and follows a long tradition that has consistently wavered between depictions that embrace physiological accuracy or move into the territory of the abstracted form that is more evocative of the poetics of vision. Many artists associated with the early twentieth-century movement known as surrealism adopted the eye as a motif to communicate a range of ideas, including the limitations of sight and its association with knowledge of the self. The 1929 silent film by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, known for its dreamlike sequences achieved through the use of montage and double exposure that evoke the irrational logic of the unconscious, also includes a now-famous scene of a razor blade slicing an eye (an effect created using an ox’s eye). Scholars of surrealism, like Mary Ann Caws, have interpreted this scene “as a Surrealist symbol of inner vision and as a confrontational assault on the moral detachment of spectatorship.”1 The same year, Belgian artist René Magritte painted The False Mirror (1929), a canvas depicting an eye with clouds around the retina. Its amalgamation of multiple parts suggests associations that range from the conscious perception of the world to the unconscious imagery of dreams. Caws has written that it can be understood as “looking at a clouded sky reflected on the eye’s surface or a mirror reflection of eye and sky, or perhaps a firmament which exists behind the eye, as if it were a window onto the idea of what appears there.”2 Man Ray’s Larmes (1930–32) is a closely cropped view of a woman’s eyes with glass beads dotted on her cheeks. Widely understood as a metaphor for the artifice of photographs at a time when the camera was conventionally associated with truthfulness, it also mocks the overly sentimental.3 All three of these works ridicule the notion of believing what one sees, because our eyes have always had a penchant for deception. Phantom Eye, with its allusion to the spectral, also suggests an inward turn and resonates deeply with the surrealist ethos. Photography is inextricably linked with vision and perception; in fact, we often think of the camera as a stand-in for the human eye. Our perception of the world is mediated by the pupil, which regulates the amount of light that reaches the retina and thus manages the information fed to the brain. It is this concept that underlies visual instruments like microscopes and telescopes. The Hubble Space Telescope (launched in 1990), and the James Webb Space Telescope (launched in 2021) represent relatively recent advances in technology that have allowed us glimpses into territories that, for most of humanity’s history, have existed only in one’s imagination. These two tools – which have been compared to giant eyes that use mirrors to take in massive amounts of light, akin to the pupil – have provided mesmerizing and often perplexing views of the cosmos. Much like Beckly’s photograph, these images of the universe are composites, stitched together from multiple views. Individual images are enhanced by adjusting the brightness and contrast to draw the eye to specific details and to emphasize the scientific value of specific observations.4 Manipulating images to highlight or diminish specific aspects of a subject is certainly not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it can be traced to the early days of the history of photography. For Beckly, seeing a rendering of the cosmos is at once an act of complex scientific achievement and an example of a form of mysticism that exists outside of ourselves – one that could possibly also be a reflection of our collective desire for knowledge through sight (a proposition that is admittedly inherently faulty in its premise). The eye that gazes out at the viewer in Phantom Eye, and perhaps looks towards the cosmos, is that of the artist’s partner, Dylan. Possibly a minor detail, but also a realization that visual perception is so often intimately personal. Beckly printed this image of Dylan’s eye on a transparent sheet of paper, melding it with the dramatically illuminated shapes of gasses that the James Webb telescope has captured. The gaze is one of intimacy and knowing, even when so much of what’s out there is unknown.
Capture 2023 42 Anvil Centre Public Art Project Rebecca Bair Curl Mapped, 2023 Rebecca Bair Curl Mapped, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Robert Marks Commissioned by the City of New Westminster, this temporary public art installation is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival April 2023 – March 2024 777 Columbia St, New Westminster
43 PUBLIC ART Curl Mapped: An Interview with Rebecca Bair Emmy Lee Wall Situated on the façade of the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, Rebecca Bair’s site-specific installation, Curl Mapped, tackles the complex, colonial history of archives to represent that which is absent: traces of Black settlers in this region. Bair spent significant time in the city archives poring over the leather-bound ledgers, reading the handwritten notes, and examining the photographs therein only to discover a gap – what she describes as “a ghost in the space.” In Curl Mapped, Bair interrupts parts of the map with curly tendrils of hair, which for her, is symbolic of heritage and cultural care. As these coils reach toward one another, attempting to close the gap in the map, they suggest the subjective nature of maps while gesturing to the need to acknowledge and repair this lack of representation. Emmy Lee Wall This is your first public artwork. What was different for you about conceptualizing this work versus the way in which you typically create works intended for interior spaces? Rebecca Bair In many ways, I thought of this work like I would an installation in any other space. I’m supremely concerned with how viewers might engage with it, how community members might find themselves within it, and how the piece will work in collaboration with the sun. Extending past the flat and becoming something more dynamic – something that shifts in the light and that responds to its environment – is often the goal for a work. Site-specificity was the biggest change and challenge of this installation as I typically work based solely on experience, regardless of site. Responding to
Capture 2023 44 the Anvil Centre, to the Fraser River, to New Westminster, and, more broadly, to Vancouver and to British Columbia was a particular challenge and privilege. I couldn’t help but want to know more of the history of this place and develop a work that created space for conversation in response to the documented establishment of place and site and heritage. This has created for me a heightened sense of responsibility as a settler, as a maker, as a thinker, and as an educator. I feel an evolved sense of obligation to Indigenous sovereignty on these lands, particularly with regard to our responsibilities as Black settlers and the ways in which we must take ownership of the good and of the bad in these histories. ELW I know your practice often engages the sun as a collaborator. Your work on the Anvil Centre occupies the glass façade of the building. Can you share a bit about how you were thinking about this transparent surface and its interaction with light? RB The dynamic relationship between the Fraser River, this building, and the sky really made it clear to me that this was a perfect site for a “sun collaboration.” I often use sun collaborations as a means of shifting my work, and in this case, the interaction functions to extend the installation – that otherwise could sit flat on a window – into space. It becomes a visualization that is untouchable, up above us, but that interrupts viewers and passersby should we find ourselves in the path of the collaboration between the sun and the curled map. In my most recent studio work, I’ve been thinking about glass, shadows, and the details that are caught in relief. This work, as it extends and projects into space, is about what is seen in the map, but is also about the edges of my curls and what happens in the shadows and the in-between as a tracing of temporal presence. ELW Archives are complicated spaces that can serve to reinforce certain narratives and histories. For this commission, you spent a lot of time exploring the New Westminster Archives in the Anvil Centre. Can you describe what you found or, perhaps more importantly, what you didn’t find there? RB I had the utmost privilege of exploring the New Westminster Archives with Erin Brown-Osterman, one of the lovely archivists, and we shared our experiences of research around representation and in the significance of colonial spaces. We spoke of Blackness on these lands and how it is a complicated settler story – one of salvation and one of imposition on Indigenous sovereignty. We spent a significant amount of time looking for traces of Blackness in the leather-bound ledgers, handwritten notes, and photographic and drawn documentation so meticulously cared for and sorted in the archives. What we realized is that there is a profound and definitive absence. It almost felt like a ghost in the space – we could feel its presence but could not see it. Coming up against this lack allowed me to experience how archives in their essence are colonial structures, and they often cannot hold the histories that they have been systematically constructed to exclude. There are many different kinds of archives that Black communities in particular have created to document life, beyond the written word. Creating an installation to visualize the potential of these history-holding systems and to open space in this map – which is meant to document history – feels like a gesture of generosity and of care. Whether it is in personal photo archives or in oral histories preciously maintained in the minds of descendants, the rest of the story is out there, and the possibilities for what lives and has lived in the spaces in-between are preserved in their own ways. ELW It’s interesting to me that you’ve chosen to use a map to represent absence – can you share a bit about that decision? RB I’ve always been intrigued by maps. My family went on many road trips when I was young, and there was always a point made of looking out the window, watching our environment to not miss the deer in the far-off field, and situating ourselves within these foreign lands. My grandmother and my father, in particular, always had a map in hand, and I was quick to follow suit. There is a magic about maps when you can recognize your size relative to the expanse of where you are. So much wonder can be attributed to how these lands have been documented from what seems to be a bird’s-eye view – all seeing – and how these maps catalogue knowing and movement. As I got older, I started to recognize the hierarchies that are embedded in maps. There are particularities about what is written in bold or italics, which lands are meticulously categorized by lines and detail, and which fields are left nameless. Inherently, maps are about space and time, but they are also about occupation and who gets to be there. While maps stage expansiveness, they are mostly about a single perspective – often colonial,
45 PUBLIC ART extractivist, reductionist, and exclusionary. Like archives, they cannot hold every story, so how do we account for traces, for footsteps, for what isn’t mapped, for that which is more fundamental than border and categorization? My instinct then says that maps need to be altered and space needs to be left to fill in the story. For Black settlers in British Columbia and, more specifically, in New Westminster, I hope this work opens further that space for inquiry, exploration, and positioning subjectivity without insinuating that their histories must live in one place or in one way. ELW Hair has been such a significant, ongoing, and symbolic part of your practice. What does it represent for you and how have you used it in this work? RB Hair, for me, is a site for cultural and personal care, as well as a manifestation of choice, subjectivity, collectivity, and heritage. With these intersecting concepts comes space for storytelling, knowledge sharing, and reciprocal learning. In my practice, hair works to hold and represent my interpretation of these notions and is thus activated as a means of materializing representation, particularly from my subjective perspective. The codification that happens through hair – both the direct indications of heritage and their absolute obstruction through a visualization of multiplicity – is where I situate my research. Curl pattern; hair colour; the ways in which our hair reaches for the sun, for those around us, or for our own skin is a magical representation of who we are and who we choose to be. My coils grab and bounce and dance and expand and shift and have agency, particularly in the sun. My hair leaves traces of my being through sun-cast shadows and through oil markings on windows and on pillowcases. The edges of the map defined by coils take on a new kind of mapping: while topographic and cartographic, it is about interrupting the contained map to create space to question our passivity with regard to colonial narratives, but additionally to impede an oversimplification of history which namely excludes Blackness. I recognize that art can only do so much, and I hope that my work and the use of my hair opens doors for curiosity. I also recognize that I am not from here, and that my curls do not represent Blackness in its ever-expansiveness. In this work, my subjectivity, my hair, and this altered hair map are odes to, and a reaching for, the histories that are missing.
Capture 2023 46 Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Viviane Sassen Leila in Clouds, from the Venus & Mercury series, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson Installation mock-up: Robert Marks
47 PUBLIC ART Arbutus Greenway: Viviane Sassen UN/REAL Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 24 – June 11 Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver Obscuring the boundaries between fashion and art photography, Viviane Sassen’s work spans still life, portraits, and landscapes in which light itself becomes a primary subject used to create surreal shadows, convey mood, and evoke the fantastical. In her work, the familiar becomes less so, as recognizable but unexpected forms collide and blur the line between representation and abstraction. The viewer is confronted with the real – the people and scenes Sassen captures with her lens – presented in a deliberately surreal manner, creating a sort of cognitive dissonance. A black void floats in a desert landscape, a woman’s silhouette hovers above paperwork forming a strange visual collage, a myriad of strawberries forms a decorative pattern verging on the abstract. Her experiments with that which we think we know purposefully confuse our perception of space, ask the viewer to consider alternate realities, and push audiences to contemplate the undetermined symbolic possibilities presented in her images. In doing so, Sassen expands our understanding of photography as a medium that offers a faithful relationship to the world around us.
Capture 2023 48 Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Lucas Blalock Conch and Berries and, 2015–17 Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber (New York/Zurich/Vienna) and Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels) Installation mock-up: Robert Marks
49 PUBLIC ART The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill GreyChurch Billboard: Lucas Blalock French Country Kitchen Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival Conch and Berries and, 2015–17 On view from March 17 – July 17, 2023 Ducks, 2014 On view from July 21 – November 20, 2023 Some Eggs, 2019 On view from November 24, 2023 – March 8, 2024 Sited on a billboard at Fraser St and 15th Ave, Vancouver Lucas Blalock’s work appears deceptively cute and comical; upon second glance, his images are surreal openings into worlds and feelings at once familiar and strange. A vase, a conch shell, and raspberries form a disjointed still life in which realistic photographs of these items have been positioned precariously so that the objects are out of sync. A series of ducks march in a row, their white bodies swallowed by the blue backdrop. Amorphous yellow blobs sit atop cosmetic sponges, conjuring devilled eggs on toast. Each work presented asks the viewer to accept ambiguity – of subject matter, of artistic intent, of perspective, of form – raising more questions than it answers. The title of the exhibition, French Country Kitchen, refers to a certain kind of middle-class aspiration that existed while the artist was growing up, signaled by this style of domestic décor. In reality, the dream of this lifestyle was often cobbled together, much like these images. Referencing the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who stressed the importance of a theatre that made its labour visible, Blalock’s work emphasizes his process of creation and embeds remnants of the means by which the work is made in the final result. His images are Frankensteined together, in a way – celebrating the “cobbled together-ness” and constructed nature that Photoshop makes possible. The artist states, “I started to consider how much labour was hidden in the making of a photograph and began making the evidence of these things part of my picture-making.” His work makes visible the changing possibilities technology presents, pushing the limits of what photography is and can be. In making his hand deliberately evident within his works, the works sit somewhere in-between photographs and drawings.
Capture 2023 50 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project Jake Kimble Grow Up #1, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Robert Marks